COACH LED BOLTS TO DIVISION TITLES
GREAT RESURRECTOR WAS THAT FOR BOLTS
• He guided the San Diego Chargers to their best record for a regular season and a pair of AFC West crowns during his five-year tenure.
I still have the cap.
On it is the lightning bolt logo, followed by the clever: Chargers Training Camp Carson, Ca.
Marty Schottenheimer, the last old-school football coach, took it off his head and tossed it to me as he was walking out of the lunch room. It was 2004, and the final day of The NFL Team That Used To Be Here’s two-year training camp experiment in Carson.
He knew how disgusted I had been with the team moving their “nip-ups” (as Jerry Magee would say) out of UC San Diego to a place even his most forgiving players couldn’t stand. And I don’t think Marty was very fond of the site, himself.
Probably why he gave me the cap. Better for me to be reminded.
But he was a football coach, and football coaches don’t openly concern themselves with such nonsense. He was not one for nonsense. Which is why he won football games.
Marty Schottenheimer, The Great Resurrector, could not defeat Alzheimer’s, which took his life late Monday. He was 77, and a pretty amazing man, a terribly smart man who knew his way around the game and the politics of it.
Other than winning playoff games, there was no
angle he wasn’t able to bend to his favor.
The first time I met him I knew this was no ordinary football coach.
He coached Washington for one season, 2001, and what is now the Football Team came here for the opener. And got boat-raced, 30-3, by a team that eventually would lose its last nine games (and hire him the following season).
Anyway, the game ended, and I was walking along the corridor outside the stadium locker rooms and Marty was coming in my direction. And he stopped and shook my hand.
“Nick, how are you?” “Fine. How you doing.” “Not too good right now.” We had never met and he knew my name.
What did that tell me? Here was a man who paid attention.
Washington would lose its first five games that year under Marty. Then it won its next five. It finished 8-8. Dan Snyder, eager to hire Steve Spurrier, fired him. Washington won seven in 2002.
By then, John Butler, assisted by A.J. Smith, had taken over as San Diego’s general manager. The team, which won one game in 2000, won five in 2001, and so Mike Riley was fired, Schottenheimer hired.
And The Great Resurrector did what he did in Cleveland and Kansas City. He resurrected.
His first team here finished 8-8. The next year he won four. The following year he won 12 and was NFL Coach of the Year.
Marty had one problem, which he certainly recognized and admitted to me. He had trouble winning playoff games. He had problems winning them here when he was better, when he made some bad decisions.
His overall record of 200-126-1 is Hall of Fameworthy. His playoff record of 5-13 is not, and that clearly is the reason he is not enshrined in Canton. He finished on the wrong end of some games that kept him out of the Super Bowl.
Cancer took Butler’s life
in 2003, Smith taking over as GM, and A.J. admits that, being new, it took him some time to flex his muscles, that he worried about players, not coaches, when he grabbed the wheel.
Smith quickly built the best roster in the NFL and, while Marty won with his smashmouth “Martyball” style, he didn’t win when it mattered. A.J. and Marty mixed like Scotch and chamomile tea. It got to the point where they didn’t speak to one another.
It all ended here in the 2006 playoffs. Marty’s 14-2 team, the best in football, lost 24-21 to the Patriots, an inferior club, despite intercepting Tom Brady three times (and dropping two).
Within a month Marty was fired, and never coached again, slipping into retirement, happy with a huge golden parachute he
shrewdly negotiated — the final brick being his insistence on hiring brother Kurt to be his defensive coordinator after Wade Phillips left for Dallas. It was a move he knew Smith and ownership never would buy.
People remain shocked that a 14-2 coach was released, but something had to give, and the Spanos family chose GM over coach, which it had before with Bobby Beathard and Bobby Ross.
But Smith had worked it that season so Schottenheimer had very little to do on game day, leaving the decision-making to Phillips and offensive coordinator Cam Cameron — until the New England fiasco, when Marty, concerned with his playoff legacy, asserted himself.
Hard to say he was the lone reason for the defeat,
but he coached it, and, while it took a few weeks, it was clear to me at least, he had coached his final game in San Diego.
Marty was a tough guy, a former AFL linebacker who made his bones in the Pittsburgh area when the Steel City was filthy. “Growing up,” he told me, “if I walked down the street and put my hand on a building, it would be black.”
He was a good coach. In 21 seasons he won 10 or more games 11 times and finished with a losing record just twice.
Marty was old-school, adverse to change. What he could do was take a lump of clay and form it into a sculpture a city could be proud of. Then the welcome would wear off.
And he consistently beat the hell out of the Raiders. He hated the Raiders.
People talk all the time about Kansas City being a great football town. But check out the Chiefs during much of the 1970s and ’80s. I was there many times when you could hear someone sneeze on the other side of the field. Arrowhead Stadium became a madhouse after Marty got there in 1989.
In Cleveland, he just missed. Of course, he lost to the Broncos thanks to John Elway’s “Drive” in the 1986 AFC championship game. I was on the field in Denver the next year when the Browns had a chance to tie the Broncos with 1:12 left in the AFC championship game, and Earnest Byner fumbled it away going into the end zone.
Marty didn’t coach fumbles. “The fumble happened, but it never would have happened if (former
Aztecs receiver) Webster Slaughter hadn’t run the wrong route,” he once told me. “The DB (Jeremiah Castille) wouldn’t have been there to force it.”
I liked Marty. I like Smith. I never understood the relationship, but then, there wasn’t one.
I judge people by the way they treat me, and Marty always treated me with kindness. He was a pro.
He did what a whole lot of coaches failed to do. But there was that one flaw he couldn’t erase, and when he tried so hard to erase it in his final game, it didn’t disappear when he had his best chance.
I’ve never worn that cap, or cleaned it. His DNA not only remains on it, it remains on this city.